How different and how much less favourable were the conditions under which the Assyrian sculptor exercised his art! For him the contours of the body and the attachments of the limbs were hidden behind heavy tunics covered with embroidery, and shawls often folded double. If by chance he caught a passing glimpse of the forms beneath, to what use could he put it? Two or three at the most of the divine types upon which his skill was most frequently employed involved a very partial nudity; most of the gods, and nearly all the men, were draped. In a few very rare instances we find an Assyrian stripped of his clothes and crossing a river by means of an inflated skin.[112] But these figures, though fairly well drawn, are very small in scale, and occupy but a subordinate place in the bas-relief where they occur.[113]
Fig. 45.—Sargon before the sacred tree. Louvre. Drawn by Saint-Elme Gautier.
Corpses stripped naked by the victor on the battle-field are of more frequent occurrence; but these, being the bodies of despised and hated enemies, are treated in very summary fashion.[114] We may say the same of the prisoners whom they behead and flay alive.[115] The mutilated statue of a nude female, rather less than life, which bears a votive inscription of Assurbilkala, the son of Tiglath-Pileser, and is now in the British Museum, is a great rarity. It is believed to represent Istar. The execution is careful, but the forms are clumsy and the proportions bad; the bust is a great deal too short.[116]
By his failure to appreciate living form for its own sake, for its beauty of line and harmony of proportion, the Mesopotamian sculptor put a voluntary limit to his ambition. He renounced, in advance, the only means within his reach of borrowing from the human figure the elements for a representation of the deity which should preserve a character of indefinite existence, of natural and sovereign excellence. But this abstention, or, if you like, this impotence, did not prevent Assyrian artists from fulfilling, in the most brilliant fashion, the other part of the task to which they were called by the habits and requirements of the society for which they laboured. The sculptors were mainly employed by the king; their chief business was to multiply his images; they were charged to commemorate the sovereign in every act of his life, in every one of the many parts involved by his indefatigable activity as builder, chief-justice, hunter, commander-in-chief, and supreme pontiff. From the king himself to the last of his soldiers or prisoners, every one who had his own marked place in a picture was draped; the sculptor could reproduce every episode of the royal life in the truest and most animated fashion, without ever having learnt to draw the nude. In fact, he was not called upon, like the Greek artist, to procure for the æsthetic sense the pure joys that are given by the sight of noble forms or movements well rendered; his duty was to commemorate by a series of clear and lively images those events that were celebrated in words in the text inscribed upon the very alabaster slabs beneath his hand.
Assyrian sculpture had this documentary character in the very highest degree; its creations, in the intention of those by whom they were commissioned, were less works of art than records.[117] The long inscriptions and the endless series of pictures with which the palace walls were covered were no more than an illustrated book.
And in what class of literature should that book be placed? It has been called an epic illustrated by sculptors—a description that seems hardly just. For in every epic worthy of the name the marvellous occupies an important place, while in these reliefs it scarcely has a place at all. With few exceptions the belief in a superior and divine world makes itself felt in Assyrian art only in those effigies of gods and demons we have already described. And such images have their places rigidly fixed by tradition; they stand at the palace gates, but are scarcely ever found within its saloons, and are entirely absent from the marches, battles, and sieges. Here and there among such pictures, but at long intervals, we find some feature that reminds us of the aid that Assur and the other national gods afforded their worshippers; now it is an eagle floating over the king’s chariot;[118] now the god himself, surrounded by a winged circle, draws his bow and launches his formidable shafts against the enemies of his people.[119] He is thus represented mounted on a galloping bull in the ring by which the standards of the Assyrian legions were surmounted.
Fig. 46.—Assyrian standard; from Layard.
All these details were small in scale and unobtrusive. The rôle played by the architect was similar to that of the draughtsmen and photographers who sometimes accompany princes and generals on a modern campaign. The programme placed before him was as narrow as it could well be; he was required to be faithful and precise, not to give proof of inventive power.